Something went wrong. Try again later

ahoodedfigure

I guess it's sunk cost. No need to torture myself over what are effectively phantasms.

4580 41781 407 627
Forum Posts Wiki Points Following Followers

A Quest Requiring Patience

By ahoodedfigure 1 Comments

Last time I was a bit dumb and saved AFTER I'd taken a quest for the temple of Julianos in my adoptive home of Satakalaam. The quest was to find a church official who was investigating a self-designated prophet who spoke of the lies of the temple. Kinda cool. So I go to the expert, she tells me about a former lover of the self-styled prophet. I got to the lover, he tells me the questy equivalent of fuck off, so I go into the dungeon that the prophet had received her revelation from, find a woman in the dungeon who tells me to talk to the lover (I DID!!). So I go back to the guy, and he refuses to talk to me. 
 
Here I am thinking the quest is busted, and I have every right to think that sort of thing given the game's reputation. But I check the Unofficial Elder Scrolls' Pages and find that the quest is actually kind of complicated...  probably one of the more intricate quests I've seen in my gaming days. 
 
If you have a decent reputation with the lover guy's faction, this one I think is with the Thieves' Guild, then he instantly gives you a clue to what you need to do next. But if you don't, and I don't, then you have to basically give up and wander around doing other stuff, sometimes for up to 20 days, before you get news from the lover about someone being murdered within the church hierarchy. You go to the person who replaces the victim, and the quest continues that way.
 
In other words, at some point, without any hints that the game would allow this, I'm expected to give up, and only THEN will I get anywhere.   All the effort I put into the game will not yield results!
 
In principle I really like this idea, but because the game never gives me a hint that such things are possible within the game's own internal language, I'm left wondering if the game is busted or I'm missing something. So many quests seem designed specifically to force us to micromanage and hit on every clue like a to-do list. Real life investigations often lead to dead-ends or unexpected revelations, and one sort of has to make up the to-do list as they go. I wonder if there's some way to do this right, to let the player know that sometimes things will resolve with a little patience. Is that even possible with the current game design structures? I almost feel as though games are usually made with us as rats in a maze, looking for cheese or ringing a bell for a food pellet. To regard a quest as more than that, pretending these characters are real people, seems to throw a wrench into this pretty simplistic model.
 
Anyone else find some strangely intricate quest, whether or not it was successfully executed? What about one that required the user to be patient, or even go do something else for a little while before a portion resolved?
 
Update: The quest must have expired, because it was gone from my log and the maze I spent an hour combing was empty of questy bits. Bleah!

1 Comments

Daggerfall: Exploring the Mind of a Mad Data-God

By ahoodedfigure 7 Comments

The Survival Kit

 
In Daggerfall, I've taken to counting the saves. You're sort of forced to. Even with all the patches there's still a chance, a dice roll if you like, that your save game will be corrupted, or your game will freak out mid-stream and have to be restarted. It's a game in itself, and not a very fun one, to preserve the work you've done.  I've been playing for a few hours now, and my save count is up to 150-something. 
 
So far I've had only one crash in all that time, although I've had my share of void glitches, including being reminded that a mountain chain has buggy dungeon entrances, such that one time I actually spawned outside of the dungeon, and saw through The Void TWO crypts, one that would have been the normal one, and one that extended from the EXIT. Not only was there another whole dungeon but there were bits of rooms floating in space, unconnected to anything, with orcs and giant bats wandering forever locked in these dimensional prisons. It was actually kind of cool, although I was annoyed I had no easy way to get back out again. 
 
(For the sake of completion I'll mention that I did get out using the tools available to me by levitating underneath the starting room and accessing the exit from there.)
 
The spell Recall is pretty much required to maintain my sanity. It allows you to teleport to any place you've anchored to with the same spell, letting you zip to a point in space, cutting down on return travel time or making navigating its insane dungeons much less taxing once you're done in there. My usual practice is to anchor the spell at the entrance to a given dungeon, but I have sometimes, when I was feeling especially daring (read: stupid), set the anchor at the quest-giver's spot. Anchoring at the entrance, once you have a wagon, is very useful because if you overload on loot you can access the wagon through the entrance without leaving and dump all but gold into it. If you've cleared out the area, you can also rest without fear of anything but random encounters. Anchoring at the quest-giver's spot saves you some time but prevents any of these conveniences. And once you leave a dungeon it respawns, so if you're not done you'll have to start all over if you go back. 
 

Exploring the Mind of a Mad Data-God

 
I can't remember how many times I've started this damned game. I love the little moments, when you enter a room with a weird configuration and marvel at how it all falls together. Or when you manage to knock someone off a cliff, use a spell to get around a trap, or find the next piece of loot that upgrades your gear. Yeah, the game is busted all to hell, but I sometimes feel that instead of playing a messed up game, I'm exploring a ruined virtual space, trying to make sense of a created world so massive that its own creators abandoned it.
 
If Daggerfall were MORE complex, this feeling would only be heightened. There's a sense that, sometimes, you're the first human being to ever see a given dungeon. Maybe a few players have been there before, but most of this stuff isn't fully documented. There could be even more crazy combinations of rooms and monsters, more weird traps, more quests even. If anything, I think the game would be better if it delved deeper into this Lovecraftian madness.  I wish I knew how easy this was to mod.
 
Still, as a game Daggerfall is painful to play, as I've talked about before. Paralysis effects seem to last too long, some of the character creation options don't work, some of the skills are nearly useless, the errors can sometimes be so thick that you'll be screwed out of one or more saved games, and while the crypts feel too small, the random dungeons are just too damned big to be fun if you're looking for something in there, since there are no clues to where a quest object might be. 
 

Where the Architects of Ancient Times Had Trod

 
But, enough of this! What I need to do is try the main game and see if those custom-made dungeons are friendlier. I'm not intimidated any more by this sort of thing, especially after beating Morrowind. I've tried my hand at beating Arena (contrary to myth, there was no Elder Scrolls game before Arena), and I was a bit bored by the lack of variety, although I'd say in some ways Arena is a better dungeon hacking system than any Elder Scrolls game that's followed.
 
I've spent enough time in the procedurally generated wilderness. Time to explore the parts of Daggerfall that were actually colonized by the designers and see if it makes any more sense.
7 Comments

Artificial Intelligence (Gaming's Alteration of Terms)

By ahoodedfigure 8 Comments

Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, after an inexplicable hiatus.
 

AI (Artificial Intelligence)


We're pretty much alone in the universe. We try to personify all kinds of creatures, inanimate objects, even ideas, and we even pretend we understand more about our fellow human beings than we probably do (although we can still be sadly predictable at times). Most of us wander through life trying to find someone we relate to, grasping through the void until we reach some comfortable equilibrium and hold on as best we can (assuming your hearts are still in it).  While finding someone else, be it friend, companion, lover, or conversation partner, is largely a crapshoot, the idea that we can CREATE something intelligent has fascinated us ever since we created automated machines that can theoretically grow in complexity over time. 
 
The computer really is the greatest augmentation humanity's managed to piece together, and I feel like we're barely scratching the surface of its potential even now. Some progressive-thinking researchers are already making strides in primitive technology that at least mimics human knowledge acquisition, and while many argue quite well that even if artificial "life" (whatever that is) is possible within an electronic environment, we're not really close yet, it's hard not to jump the gun a bit and say we've already got artificial intelligence around us. I can't tell if that's over-selling machines or under-selling human intelligence, but there you are.
 
In the real world, a phrase I'll continue to abuse because you know what I mean (even though everything is in the real world, sorry to say, whether we make it up or not. All the stuff my nightmares have created over the years will cease to exist when I die, but that doesn't mean that those virtual monsters somehow fail to rate just because they're subjective), Artificial Intelligence tends to refer to the rather esoteric quest for a thinking computer, or at least a thinking-like behavior. We're often tempted to push this term into places it doesn't belong, like talking about any old computer being intelligent, but this is largely understood as joking, personification, or naive hopefulness.
 
In games, however, Artificial Intelligence winds up being a word we throw around for ANY independent game behavior. We freely talk about the AI of the dudes we shoot, the opposing nations or heroes, the way animals spread across a map and kill each other or us. But notice how it often applies to the personified. It's less likely, I think, that you would describe a complex process where an environment is created to be Artificial Intelligence by itself. It has to somehow be reactive, and we often have to be able to relate to it in some way. Yet if you have a procedural generation engine that fits everything together, that's probably some of the more intelligent things a computer program can do, it's just that we often think of these things as just strings of equations... and they usually are. 
 
It seems like we really haven't nailed down what intelligence actually means, so we fall back on the animus, the spirit in the machine, that feeling that we're connecting to something, however stupid or blind it might be. We can even be forgiving toward an AI if it's pitiful, or assume it's cheating if it's kicking our ass. The weird thing about Artificial Intelligence, both within games and without, is that it may not be easily personifiable should we actually achieve it. It may "think" in ways that defy easy explanation, even by the people who create it.
 
I describe things in terms of AI myself, no use in denying it. And I actually find it a useful term, even in describing complex systems that wouldn't usually be described as intelligent. But that's in part because I don't believe in the separation between humankind and its tools. I believe there's a continuum between what we are and what we create. So when I think of Artificial Intelligence, I also include the safeguards and features the designers put into the game as virtual extensions of their intelligence, however flawed or incomplete they might feel. Artificial Intelligence then, is a reactive, descriptive term for how we interact with a machine running on its own. It still, in a way, reflects its creators.
 
I'm reminded of the Deep Blue chess tournament against Gary Kasparov. Kasparov himself said, and I think rightly, that it wasn't just Deep Blue he was competing against, but also the programmers, who were adjusting the machine throughout the course of the tournament. You want to talk cyberpunk, think about this: Kasparov was playing against an amalgam of computer scientists and a machine, all at once. Freaky, huh? 
 
So, is Artificial Intelligence abused as a term? Yes, but only in a strictly technical sense. In another way I think we'll only benefit from realizing that machines are an extension of us. We'll learn more about ourselves that way, and the potential of our creations to embody our essence. For all the frightening visions we often see in fiction when we talk about machines taking on human aspects, I think there's great potential for transcendence there, too. Describing the behavior of in-game characters as AI doesn't feel so far afield to me, if you take the long view.
 
Any terms you all can think of that have taken on new meanings in video games? You find these changes irritating, or improvements, or something else entirely? 

Next Up: Death.

8 Comments

Schadenfreude 2: Time for a New Computer?

By ahoodedfigure 6 Comments

This string of failure is brought to you by Getting Up. See the end of this list for why I have taken a break from this game.
 
Last weekend we picked up our cooperative Gladius game after a long hiatus to see if I could recruit a minotaur early, rather than toward the end of the game. We managed to do it fairly quickly, although the deal was that if I was going to have Langston in my party, he was not allowed to have green nipple rings. I conceded the demand, and am now looking forward to building this guy up from the start. He will kick major ass and I am happy.
 
The rest of my gaming experiments of late have been abject failures. I realize that seeing other people fail can sometimes feel rewarding, so I thought I'd share these failures with you as a twisted sort of gift. I imagine some of these problems are fixable without upgrades, but getting a lot of 'splosions in a row is a nice pattern that's hard not to capitalize upon now that I'm breaking my blogging silence. Take this article how you like; I'd prefer people who didn't enjoy watching me suffer to look at this as a way to learn about games you wouldn't otherwise have noticed. I will be upgrading my system eventually so it's hard for me not to just laugh at this stuff, and hope a lot of it will be solved once I get my new Frankenstein's Monster together.

Frayed Knights

 
Egge has already talked in depth about the demo for Frayed Knights, a turn-based party RPG which is like someone read my mind and made a game different than I was expecting but that's perfectly OK. Booting up the demo, it tells me:
Curse you, o' gaming gods!!! (note Skinedit in the corner? That's for Minecraft, another game I can't play yet :) )
Curse you, o' gaming gods!!! (note Skinedit in the corner? That's for Minecraft, another game I can't play yet :) )
 
I can still play it, but the edges of the screen are cut off. It's really weird, but this horrible monitor has always had messed-up compatibility problems with our ancient graphics card. Like my last list of failures I wrote about a while ago, this is probably what's causing most of these issues, so I'm not really surprised.
 
I did play through a bit of the demo, right up until I killed off the first group of monsters and saw the little reward system for sticking with the game rather than loading saves all the time (I don't do that, that sounds pretty tedious. Do you do that with RPGs? I only do it if people get disintegrated or I waste a lot of resources on something that was pointless because the game system wasn't dynamic enough. Otherwise I tough it out if I can). I really like the bonuses it gives you, as I read them in the manual, although I was sort of wishing for better loot or something if you never loaded. Anyway, I'd reached a point where I felt like missing the edges of the screen was starting to impact my gameplay so I quit. I think the issue is just because it either doesn't recognize the mode I'm running it in, or that there's something else going on. If it had fullscreen mode maybe this wouldn't be a problem. I dunno.
 

Labyrinth of Crete

 
Originally made for the CDi, Labyrinth of Crete is a puzzler made by the same guy who did The Fool's Errand, (an olde dayes puzzle adventure game with a sequel coming out toward the end of this year). It's available for free along with a bunch of his other old games, and since I was in a Greek Myths mood after acquiring Langston and seeing the reviews of a cool-looking card game called Omen, I thought I'd try it out. Let me know if anyone manages to get it working in their compatibility mode, because mine is apparently not up to the task. It's well-known that there's this period in Windows compatibility that even for XP machines is nigh impossible, and I think old Labyrinth of Crete has hit the sweet spot. With stuff like this I just have to shrug my shoulders and move on.
 

The Black Lodge - 2600

 
Whew, I guess this means I don't have to go in, Agent Cooper. Um... I'll guard the exit.
Whew, I guess this means I don't have to go in, Agent Cooper. Um... I'll guard the exit.
Some cheeky monkey put together a faux 2600 game that reflects the scenes I loved the most during the series Twin Peaks, the show which was heavily referenced in Deadly Premonition. It's called The Black Lodge, and it can be downloaded from the creator's page hereI'd suggest if you're not familiar with the series and would like to be, to skip this for now and go back to it once you've watched most or all of the episodes (some are better than others; just warning you in advance). They even put together a catalog page and an instruction manual straight from the classic designs, which was a delight for this codger to read. But when I started it up, the "2600" mask dripped away to reveal the "your graphics card is ancient" skeletal face underneath. Pretty funny since it's supposed to be referencing a game system that's nearing 40 years old.
 
Even if you're not interested in playing it, if you liked the series, or at least appreciate its aesthetics (or the 2600's) to take a look at the package they have ready for download. Pretty snazzy.  
 
Next are two titles I tried to boot up for the first time as I was typing this blog. This is how much I love you.

Owl Boy  


D-Pad Studio, a Norwegian-based game developer has released a demo for their game Owl Boy, an action-adventure that has some of the coolest pixel animations I've ever seen. At least, from what I saw in a video I watched. I should have known I might have a problem when their main webpage is basically (WARNING!!) one big page with all their updates splattered in a cascade of content...  ugh, guys... anyway, trying to boot this one up meant I got to learn the miracles of Service Pack upgrading. Here's a narrated video of someone playing the demo; check it out, it looks awesome. 
 

Hide

 
After reading this article on RPS I downloaded Hide, but only tried it out while typing this article up to see if it works. So far, I get the intro that shows you how to move, and then I can hear some creepy stuff, but I only see a completely white screen. Maybe the Unity Engine's too much for this thing? Seems perfect for Halloween, this game. Read the article above if you want to learn more. 

Rant

 
I like that each of the games I tried highlighted a different problem my machine has; a good reminder that an upgrade is necessary. Well, sort of. You know, pretty much all of us are on this upgrade train now, even if some of us are still in the caboose. We get left behind, we get the latest tech, we're back in it for a while, then get left behind again. Only people who blow a lot of money or have good connections manage to keep up with these standards, but while some of these upgrades allow for new levels of beauty, a lot of the game mechanics themselves aren't much more sophisticated. Never mind the much maligned social games, or the lo-fi indie titles, a lot of games seem not to be changing as much as they might. Part of it is game designers being afraid to make the first move in terms of new mechanics, especially if a lot of money is riding on a given game, but game makers are, too, forced to keep up on this tech ladder. 
 
I mean, we roll our eyes when we hear that new consoles are being considered for year X, but the poor old PC doesn't even get those benchmarks. Graphics cards have little fans now, PC's are surrounded by coolant, processors are split into several different processors, and the software that rides on top of these behemoths have a bunch of new little tricks creators have to learn to keep up with their peers.

Moore's Law or not, I wonder how much longer this will go on. Maybe we'll reach a plateau and just stick with it for a while, and stop freaking out every time Direct X bumps up a notch. I think a lot of these innovations are really innovations; when I see Rage, despite all its problems, I'm in awe. I just wonder how much this concentration on tech upgrades means we keep spending too much energy keeping up, and not enough building a solid foundation. I mean, 3D art is fucking gorgeous now, do we really need to worry about the fiddly details so much anymore?

I'm told that, in a way, PCs HAVE reached a plateau of sorts, and that a lot of the upgrades aren't really necessary. Still, though, software leaders often encourage you to bump up your card, or turn your dual into a quad. I'm new at this upgrade thing, at least what it's become in the past few years, but it reminds me a bit too much of the same old trudge, especially since the online gaming boom means that upping your processor and connection might give you an edge over your competitors. At least consoles, for all their goofiness, give you the opportunity to squeeze as much as you can from the same machine to see what you can get. This used to not be that great a thing since most of us were locked out, but now that development platforms for consoles have really opened up, there's a certain advantage there, even for independents and small companies, that wasn't there before. In a way, those limitations help foster creativity.

/Rant

 
Anyway, just want to take this opportunity to thank my readers over the years who've read my stuff and kept me on my toes. It may not feel like it, but I think I've improved as a writer by publishing my ramblings here. Thanks.
 
My next task is to play some Baldur's Gate 2 so I can watch Vinny and Dave's BG2 video. We researched it last night and determined that I'd barely made it into Chapter 2 the last time I played, so I have a ways to go yet. At least I don't have to upgrade to do it! 
6 Comments

Getting Up (finally revisiting this game after 4 years' hiatus)

By ahoodedfigure 3 Comments

I wrote about my impressions of this game a long time ago, I think, although I more talked about its graffiti mechanics in that post if I remember correctly. Getting Up takes place in a city under constant police crackdown, with you being an artist newly kicked out of the house and ready to make statements through ink, paint, fists and the occasional 2 x 4 across the face. 
 
I've played it for a few hours, getting further than I did way back in 2008 when I played it last. My initial impressions hold up, where the controls are often too fiddly for me to just feel like I can dive in, and I'm always in danger of forgetting what does what, especially when it comes to combat. You're also more creative in what you SELECT than what you actually do when actually Getting Up your ink or paint designs. You get four slots for each type of action, be it stickers, inkstick, murals, quick spraypaint, stencils or whatever else. You choose these in the setup screen before a level, so you never get to react on the fly to situations. The actual getting up mechanic for murals is interesting, in that you have to worry about drips if you spray in one place too long, and you have a limited amount of time to finish. Not that all your effort matters that much in the long run, since once you move on from an area it all resets anyway.  This isn't an open-world game.
 
Probably my favorite mechanic is the imperfect but intuitive maneuvering, which lets you climb up girders with fluidity that at least points to Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. It's not too difficult to move around, and even if you're in danger of falling off, a little caution pretty much guarantees your safety (although the game engine didn't expect me to run away from a security guard by climbing up a girder. The guy damaged me by hitting the base of girder even though I was 30 feet above him, which was pretty lame).
 
What I really like, though, and what's going to keep me playing, is the mood. As much as I sympathize with people who say mechanics are the thing in games, Getting Up manages to get to some core mood that I've never seen in any other game.  It's bleak, no question, and while it tends to diminish itself by pushing too hard into trying to look tough and being about empowerment before you even know how rough it is in the city, its ugly, raw picture of the downside of urban life has a refreshing clarity. You WANT to see people put up shaded murals with big bold letters, because what's underneath is ugly and crumbling, even if it seems pristine.
 
Some of the music is a bit repetitive, but when you hit upon a great track things all fall into place for me. It also rewards exploration, which is a big bonus in my book, although at times I wish I could go back to a level to complete it, rather than starting it all over again to perfect it. It does keep track of music unlocks, though, as well as Black Book unlocks, which have pieces of real-life graffiti art history, with the artists and samples of their work. 
 
I have to admit my taste in urban art is narrow; I prefer stuff that's clever or colorful, or at least daring. I can't stand random inkstick names on the sides of otherwise inoffensive buildings, but if someone makes a bleak tunnel under a road come alive with shapes, color, and mood I can't help but feel proud of the people who did it. The game's own instructions say that it doesn't condone this sort of behavior in real life, but it's just one of those things we have to deal with-- we admire something, but if it's not sanctioned we can't quite say we do. We become divided, artificially, between our open selves and our private selves. 
 
There are urban art projects that are sanctioned out there, which I can totally support. In one of my old home towns they closed off a road and had kids paint a giant wall that towered above an accessway however they wanted, brightening up that bleak little area. In a similar way, whatever your politics, this game provides a virtual environment that helps teach you about some of the real the people behind those strange little emblems we see, and the reasons they might want to put them up. I wish the combat was better, I wish there was even more to spraypainting than just doing everything in one coat and calling it good, some stuff is repetitive, some of it gratiitous, some of it janky, but the game haunts me with its mood, showing that if there's some heart put into a game, there's always something worthwhile inside.

3 Comments

Tank, Farming (Games' Alteration of Terms)

By ahoodedfigure 6 Comments

(With thanks to Tennmuerti for the idea of Tank. Now the Cowboy Bebop theme song is in my head, which is not a bad thing! )
 
Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, then nukes the site from orbit.
 

Farming


One of the side effects of the Fetch Quest is the need to gather X amount of Y. In games with random drops, then, you are often asked to kill a certain monster (mob), or locate certain resource nodes (whatever you want to call them) that will, eventually, yield what you want. Even if the drops aren't random (in games like the upcoming Salem, at least you're usually guaranteed to get SOME branches from a newly grown tree) and you get these things every time, the act of using the figurative scythe in gaming is called farming.
 
Real life farming covers the whole of the process, from sowing the seeds to cultivation to harvesting. In games it's more about the harvesting.
 
Some people find farming relaxing. They like to go out and do simple tasks and get a pat on the head for their efforts, and I can't say that I'm completely immune to that, but I find that enough farming will start to spark this sort of existential debate across my corpus callosum. It goes something like this:

 
A: "What the fuck are we doing?"
 
B: "Hm? What do you mean?"
 
A: "I know you hate it when I do this, but I'm going to reduce this to base elements here. Pretend those aren't monsters, but just areas you click on. You SOMETIMES get a reward for clicking on them, sometimes not. Eventually when you get enough rewards, you take them back to the dipshit standing at the entrance who can't be bothered to do this even though he's higher level than us."
 
B:"You're right. But then we'll get that leather tunic if we do this."
 
A:"Fine. But this is the last time."

 
Repeat until A finally throttles B in its sleep and I move on to something more rewarding.
 
Since the term farming used in games seems like a bit of a criticism it's hard for me to begrudge it. It's when terms like this become expected aspects of play across entire genres that worries me. We have a tendency to settle in to comfortable grooves and pretend things were always like this, but I get the feeling people are becoming a bit tired of the same old formula. Even variations on this theme might make things not as maddening, but why innovate when you can take the safe route? Bleah.
 

Tank


I was never quite sure when this term became ubiquitous, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with MMOs again. Maybe I didn't play pen and paper RPGs enough to realize it, but we never really talked about characters in terms of the roles they played in combat. It was more that it was understood, the fighter was the one that took hits (because he or she had high hit points and usually a decent armor class).
 
Tanks in real life are of course those armored machines that propel soldiers and explosives over rough terrain, often covered in enough protection to prevent small arms fire from hurting anything or anyone inside.  "Tank" refers to a few other things too, just to drive foreign speakers insane: tank can mean you've failed utterly, and can also refer to a sturdy container. Referring to a person as a tank tends to mean they're tough, and is probably a more direct analog to its gaming meaning.
 
Tanks in gaming refer specifically to the armored part, and how it, in effect, draws damage away from others by concentrating threat. Tanks wouldn't be much use if enemies could intelligently pick targets, so the concept of aggro helps mitigate this, by forcing many enemies to hang around the tank and do it damage because of a subjective need to whomp on this target first because it's, I dunno, irritating. You could also argue that aggro is a way of exaggerating threats, but as everyone knows, at least in fantasy gaming, it's smart to go for the wizards first.
 
Of course there are actual tank tanks in gaming, fuel tanks and the kind that go boom, but if I type the word tank too much more the word is going to lose all meaning for me. As with farming above, my worry here is that the idea of the tank is going to become firmly entrenched, if it hasn't already, in what people expect when they play a tactical combat game with multiple characters. It's certainly warranted in some games, but if you expect to see it everywhere, and get confused when you don't, then your skills have perhaps become too specialized. It's time to open the hatch and take in the fresh air outside, before you contract photophobia.
 
Any terms you all can think of that have taken on new meanings in video games? You find these changes irritating, or improvements, or something else entirely?
6 Comments

Level, Grinding (Games' Alteration of Terms)

By ahoodedfigure 12 Comments

(Thanks to RaikohBlade and later Astras for heavily hinting about Grinding.)
 
Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, at the end of a 50 foot rope, at least. 
 

Level

 
It's a pretty utilitarian term that most people are familiar with in real life, whether we're talking levels in a building (floors, storeys, whatever) or takin' it to the next level if you're stuck in the 1990's. 
 
Level in games actually gets rather convoluted, due in part to the influence of pen and paper role-playing games, I'm betting. You have character levels, which are tiers that characters reach as they gain experience (there's another word for later, I guess. Two if you count character), you have levels in a dungeon, which is as close to the real world examples above, and you have the one I'm going to focus on right now: game levels.
 
Levels in a game have been around pretty much from their popular inception. When you cleared one level/wave/stage, on came the next one. In arcade design this means you upped the difficulty, sometimes upped the points and the sights you could see, all with the purpose of murdering the player-character so the user will pay you more quarters. This meaning of the term stuck with gaming long after it ceased to have meaning in a lot of games. Level still suggests a discreet beginning and end, and many games sort of intertwine their locations, allowing you to go back to places you've been, so level in that rigid sense doesn't quite work. Yet people who don't know a lot about games will often talk about "beating a level", whether or not the game even has levels. There are no levels of this sort in, say, Elder Scrolls. You'll have character levels and dungeon levels, but it's not a game philosophy that complements the linear progression of areas you think of when you hear "level."
 
My verdict on this one is pretty simple, despite all the complexity: level has been used way too much for too many different things. In pen and paper RPGs it's actually a bit sad to see it being used too much, because it can actually cause confusion, especially for new players. Vidya Games too have this general learning curve with nomenclature, and so while I don't expect "level" to fall into disuse, I do understand why non-gamers often look at those who play games as cultists. As Astras showed in his comment on my previous entry in this series, we talk funny.
 

Grinding


The two real-world examples that come to mind are grinding in skating, and "the daily grind" and related meanings, which is probably a direct precedent to the gaming meaning.
 
In gaming, grinding is specifically about working an often repetitive task to reach a new tier or tiers (levels, if you like). Its ubiquity often spills out to just mean any sort of indirect increase in character abilities, wealth, stats, whatever. You grind to get to this point, even if you're completely involved and there's no repetition, which I feel is taking things a bit too far. Grinding suggests that it sorta sucks or is a distraction.
 
Grinding, though, is not something I'm terribly familiar with. I'm more the kind of person who will try to go into an area that's too high level for me and get by with a minimum of repetition. Once I realized that grinding was a tactic people used to get ahead of static difficulty curves, I pretty much set out to DEFY that and see how well I could inch by big problems with an extra challenging battle. In games with full scaling grinding doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it is a legitimate tactic when the difficulty doesn't change as much relative to player-character ability.
 
This term seems firmly entrenched, and it's one of the few terms I've talked about so far that is more reactive, in that it actually might disappear altogether if designers move away from styles of play that seem to require this sort of behavior. It's a world I'm largely ignorant of, though; even in games like Phantasy Star or Final Fantasy, where people consider grinding almost required, I tended NOT to play that way. Probably one of the reasons I never got top-level techniques in the Phantasy Star games or Knights of the Round in FF7.
 
Any terms you all can think of that have taken on new meanings in video games? You find these changes irritating, or improvements, or something else entirely?
12 Comments

Brief Diablo 3 Note (Rashomon Edition)

By ahoodedfigure 5 Comments

Maybe others have talked about this before, but as I remember it, the "Diablo 3's too bright" controversy began when people complained in forums about a public showing of the graphics...  a LONG time ago. It became a bit of a meme, I rolled my eyes and concentrated on stuff I was interested in, while secretly thinking that while, yes, it was bright, it was also pretty. 
 
Anyway, apparently one of the people in charge of art direction at Blizzard stepped up and defended the game's design against these accusations. He was promptly fired, the PR folks said this wasn't how Blizzard acts, and I got the impression they'd listen to fan complaints and make it darker.
 
Seeing the beta now it does look darker than I remember those initial shots being, although those brighter shots may be in a different place altogether for all I know. (Three "all" words in one clause. Ding!) It seems, from my outsider's perspective, that they responded to the criticism and made things darker, but I can't tell for sure.
 
Cue the many running commentaries that say "pff, this doesn't light bright at all, those guys are idiots", showing that the memory of the meme outlasted the brief, controversy on the part of one of the design staff stepping up to defend his game and getting the axe for it.
 
If I don't remember how this all went down please help me with this timeline; I'm curious if my memory truly is this hazy or if there was a major change in direction at some point.
 
EDIT: Now that I've done some research, it's been suggested that this editor's departure was apparently unrelated.
 
It now seems like they've been saying it never was going to be changed...  yet it does look different to me in its current form than it did back when those first screens came out so long ago. Here's another complaint from back in 2009 by someone who used to work at Blizzard, and in 2008 Leigh Alexander interviewed Jay Wilson about the art style.
 
I get the feeling it may be because what we see in the Beta may not reflect what we see later in the game, that it might look brighter or more colorful in spots depending upon the environment. It doesn't bother me a whole lot either way; I can't see myself purchasing this game any time soon anyway. I've only beaten Diablo 2 once (though I've started it plenty of times), and I tend to feel that it more tweaks my loot compulsions than delivers enough fun for time spent. I think most of the time I spend is stuffing my coffers full of gems, bee-lining it for the Horadric Cube, then combining them all obsessively to get more space.
 

 2008, Barbarian
 2008, Barbarian
 
 2008, Overland jungle?
 2008, Overland jungle?

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
These two shots certainly seem brighter than what we've seen in the Beta, at least as far as light levels. But maybe they meant color or bleakness during that petition? They have two IGN tagged links in one petition here and here, but they're zoomed in... I guess that's the Barbarian? Seems so.
 
If anyone's had the chance to play the game, do you feel that the Diablo 3 style violates your expectations? I figure as long as it delivers loot, clean controls, and skill ups that's pretty much the Diablo formula.     
 
This was going to be a short article, but I'm reminded of my earlier discussion about how player criticism should be smart and not reflexive. I guess you can't really help it if so many people just react this way and instantly respond to it. But it's hard to tell how many people still care about the art direction now, however it's perceived. It's one of the perils of revealing your content early, I guess. Things don't always go as planned.
5 Comments

Boss, Mob (Games' Alteration of Terms)

By ahoodedfigure 6 Comments

(Thanks to BeachThunder for the idea for Boss)
 
Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, at the end of a ten foot pole, at least.
 

Boss

 
 
Probably one of the most commonly known gaming terms, Boss evokes a confusion of images for me. The first time I learned this term I think was through a friend's Nintendo Power, and I thought that the big guy at the end of the level that you had to beat was somehow the local ruler or whatever. Strictly speaking, a boss is just a tougher-than-average encounter, often yielding access or greater rewards, but at the very least it's some sort of obstacle that needs to be bypassed, usually through violence. 
 
The real-world word suggests a simple leadership role, and often, at least to me, suggests unofficial, possibly criminal connections. Crime boss, all that. Whenever anyone says boss with regard to a game, and I don't have an image already in front of me of what they're talking about, I imagine the massive Kingpin from Marvel comics, because in games you'll often get bosses that aren't only tougher, but also bigger. I assume that's to help communicate their toughness to the player and make the player feel like this encounter is more momentous.
 
I don't mind either interpretation, really, and in games they can sometimes overlap. You occasionally get a boss in games that can't defend itself too well and lets their minions get carved up instead, which more reflects the all-too-human traits of fragility, stupidity, and cowardice.

Mob

 
 
The first time I heard the term "mob", I had NO CLUE what was being talked about. It was the first time anyone had described a Massively-Multiplayer Online RPG to me that wasn't in text (see MUDs and the like for history, if you're curious). Since all I had was my imagination, I imagined a 2D sprite in a dusky 3D hillside coming toward the player. It was a bit fanciful, I don't think it was a serious attempt to understand what she was actually talking about so much as some sort of coping mechanism of my brain to try to parse what she was saying. Now, for the first time in recorded history, I will attempt, with the magic of a cheap paint program, to depict a facsimile of what I imagined she was talking about:
 
 
 "Oh shit! Two pitchforks and a shovel? That's too high level for me." (This almost looks like it could be a flag.)
I assumed that if I was in any way correct, you'd actually know what this "mob" looked like if you ran into them. They're really called mobs, according to Wikipedia, because in the delightfully negligent world of computer shorthand it was short for mobile, as in a monster or group of monsters that moved around a dungeon, as opposed to staying in one place. 
 
I'm personally not a big fan of specialized MMORPG terms leaking out into general gaming. It doesn't really apply to real life, so at least there's no leakage there, but when someone calls what is clearly a monster a mob, with no clear connection to its original Multi-User Dungeon meaning, it's probably the same feeling others get when someone new to games describes things strangely. It's fine with me if all monsters in a world are reduced to this word in an MMO, I guess, but I like to think that we've come far enough in gaming that at least in some games, even in MMOs, we look at these creatures as individual or group creations rather than ALL part of the same class. Ruins the fantasy for me to think of them as boring old piles of bytes and behaviors, even if that's what they really are.
 
Any terms you all can think of that have taken on new meanings in video games? You find these changes irritating, or improvements, or something else entirely?
6 Comments

Deus ex Machina, Fog of War (Games' Alteration of Terms)

By ahoodedfigure 9 Comments

Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, at arm's length at least.

Fog of War


To me, the term fog of war has always meant that under wartime conditions, things that seem like simple choices become a lot harder to make. Too many things are moving at once, too many different factors are involved, and sometimes you'll find yourself standing right next to the enemy and neither party knows the other is there, all because there's so much pressure, so many life-or-death decisions to be made, and no way to objectively evaluate every moment, every strength and weakness, while simultaneously trying to survive.
 
Now, I'll hear people use the term fog (for a common tactic used by programmers to limit draw distances) and fog-of-war interchangeably. When there's fog at a distance, it can just easily be called fog of war for some. Of course this isn't right, but I think the reason this happens is because the use of fog-of-war was inched away from its original meaning through Real-Time Strategy games like Warcraft. Instead of just the enemy being obscured, the map is obscured, encouraging exploration and sneak attacks, but in a purely material way that can be alleviated by posting a scout at the edge of the wilderness (or turning off the semi-transparent fog-of-war that obscures even explored locations). To me, fog of war includes the mental realm, and is a way of characterizing the chaos that erupts when people with definite plans clash. 
 
I prefer the original meaning, because it encompasses far more than the latter modification. But a game that takes steps to approach that original meaning gain my respect.
 

Deus ex Machina (The God out of the Machine)


As I learned it, the term can have a strongly negative connotation, referring to the way some playwrights in Greece liked to resolve their plot tangles. Things would look bad for our heroes or victims, when suddenly a god would come down and whisk them away at the last moment, using a "machina", a machine, which in this case was likely a winch and pulley system, with an actor portraying a god hanging on. There's probably some more concrete definition lurking in a wiki, but I'm trying to just go by memory here. It's said that when a deus ex machina plot resolution is used, that the writer has written themselves into a corner, or just lacks the skills to resolve their story. 
 
Gaming, as well as popular fiction, has expanded the meaning in a way I find interesting. Taking the literal definition, the god out of the machine, people have used it to refer to animism in the realm of the human-made inanimate world. This takes on special significance when we talk about near-future advances in artificial intelligence, as depicted in the animated Ghost in the Shell, the replicants of Blade Runner (the movie, not so much PKD's book), or the reasons behind the title of the Deus Ex games (EDIT: although, upon further reading, maybe I misunderstand its original usage as it applied to the game. I'm willing to bet, though, the common understanding of the title as it relates to the games refers instead to something other than the first two reasons Warren Spector referred to in this interview). Despite this being a confusion of ideas that muddles the original meaning, seeing how dramatically the world has changed as computers have become more ubiquitous, it's easy for me to see the value of the personification, or at least classification, of these machines that are so much a part of so many lives.
 
In this case, I like both meanings. Yeah, it's confusing to have them overlap like this, but each has its value. I just hope when people use the term they're aware of both definitions, so they don't run the risk of clouding a discussion.
 
Any terms you all can think of that have taken on new meanings in video games? You find these changes irritating, or improvements, or something else entirely?
9 Comments